Plankton Wat, the project of Eternal Tapestry guitarist Dewey Mahood, is the sound of sanctuary. Mahood is joined on Spirits by two other humans: Edibles' Dusty Dybvig, who sneaks a bit of hand drum onto Spirits' title track, and Mahood's young daughter, Harper, on the shaker. A sense of retreat echoes throughout Spirits, but it's not the lonesome kind; rather, Spirits feels like the kind of patient, deliberate work you know you have to get away from everything to get right. Plankton Wat's music, all earthy drones, knotty acoustic fingerpicking and swirling psychedelic wanderings, creates a kind of seclusion in sound, a place far removed from the mess and noise of the modern world.
Mahood's been making music as Plankton Wat for a decade now, much of it small-batch cassette and CD releases. The all-instrumental Spirits proves both a coalescing and a continuation of his formidable back catalog: Everything here clocks in under 10 minutes, and though Mahood has let his songs wander further afield in the past, he's never had a record that felt so deliberately of a piece from start to finish. Spirits' balance of earthbound textures and spectral meanderings is the result of some careful craftsmanship on Mahood's part; it's easily his warmest, most approachable record, but beneath its dusty underbelly and swaths of distortion, there's at least an echo of everything he's ever done here. His acoustic playing is stately but never showy, wonderfully unhurried; on electric, Mahood steadily pushes things starward, with an intensity of focus that goes far beyond mere noodling. Spirits is, at times, the kind of trickling wood-and-water music you'd expect to hear at your friendly neighborhood incense peddlers, but even its moments of more straight-up, pastoral prettiness have the adventurous, open-armed spirit of anything on your local tape label.
Mahood has claimed inspiration for Spirits and his other work from free-jazz icons like Don Cherry, Alice Coltrane, and others, musicians who gave little mind to genre boundaries and formal conventions in order to seek some pure truth. That was, of course, the late 1960s, back when that kind of talk didn't inspire quite so much blushing outside of Erowid, but Mahood's music-- though it's rooted in folk, not jazz-- does seem right in line with that lineage and its aim of transcendending the self. Spirits' meditative, solitudinous beauty reflects the kind of serious thought you can only do under the influence of heavy-duty chemicals or-- more likely, in Mahood's case-- when you find yourself miles from the nearest human. The time-slowing, pulse-quelling Spirits is a good place to get some thinking done.
